Using a unique district-level panel dataset, we investigate the effect of banking system penetration on financial inclusion in Ghana. To purge potential endogeneity bias in the underlying relationship, we exploit a change in the policy environment of...
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
The paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the...
We analyse two potential effects arising from regional (and with EU) integration—increased quality of institutions (including the quality of financial institutions) and, economic policies and reduced multilateral exchange rate volatility—in a...
Our paper investigates the unexplored impact of education on inflation and of this relationship on economic growth. By using a sample of 102 countries observed on non-overlapping five-year data spells over the period 1963-2001, we find that average...
Recent years have witnessed important structural changes around the world as a result of the globalization process, the creation of new economic blocks and the liberalization of financial sector in many countries. Responding to these changes many...
Utilizing the stochastic frontier approach, this study conducts a comparative analysis of profit efficiency and cost inefficiency of commercial banks operating in 29 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries by bank ownership (domestic bank, SSA foreign...
George Mavrotas While recent years have witnessed new interest in the finance–growth nexus, the relationship between domestic resource mobilization...
This special issue of the Journal of International Development presents the results of a study initiated two years ago by UNU/WIDER on `The impact of the liberalization of the exchange rate and financial markets in sub-Saharan Africa'. The project...
The volume Institutional Change and Economic Development fills some important gaps in our understanding of the relationship between institutional changes and economic development. It does so by developing new discourses on the 'technology of...
This paper investigates the impact of income and non-income shocks on child labour using a model in which the household maximizes utility from consumption as well as human capital development of the child. Two types of shocks are considered...
This paper discusses the process, problems and impacts of the financial sector reform in Indonesia, particularly since the late 1980s. The reform has encouraged a surge in private sector capital inflows to supplement the already high domestic savings...
Beginning with an empirical analysis of banking crises using a logit econometric model covering a sample of developed and developing countries between 1980-97, the paper suggests that crises are more likely in years of low growth and high real...
We analyse the prospects for greater monetary integration in Africa, in the wake of EMU. We argue that the structural characteristics of African economies are quite different to the EMU members but that much can be gained from monetary cooperation...
A survey of the changing relationship between the market for political services and the market for financial services.
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Part of Book Resetting the International Monetary (Non)System
Financial development can exert a significant influence on the distribution of income. In this paper, using Chinese provincial data over the period of 1991-2000 and applying the generalized method of moment (GMM) techniques, we investigate the...
The paper examines the source of financial market fragmentation in sub-Saharan Africa in the framework of institutional economics. Based on fieldwork data from Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania, it analyses financial risk management, the...
This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid central-planning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We...
This paper reviews the challenges and experiences in rebuilding fiscal institutions in postconflict environments, based on advice from the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department to selected countries. The recommended strategy involved a three-step process...
This paper proposes to organize thinking about the opportunities for improving and extending financial markets and safety nets for the poor, by focusing on factors that may explain why the linkage of local financial networks and safety nets with the...
This study is an attempt towards an integration of financial development and its effect on the real sector via the transmission mechanism with special reference to developing and emerging market economies. It finds two cointegrating relations between...
The paper deals with changes in the regulation and supervision of the Latin American financial sector in the aftermath of the ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994–95. While it finds that both have improved, regulation and supervision cannot resolve all problems...
Financial development is vulnerable to social conflict. Conflict reduces the demand for domestic currency as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Conflict also leads to poor quality governance, including weak regulation of the financial system...
Poor rural and urban households in developing countries face substantial risks, which they handle with risk-management and risk-coping strategies, including self-insurance through savings and informal insurance mechanisms. Despite these mechanisms...
This article argues that developing countries face inherent obstacles in setting up efficient financial regulation, and building up a sound banking sector: the presence of multiple tasks and multiple principals, poor institutions, lack of economies...
by Helmut Reisen The case for mutual benefits arising from the global diversification of portfolios holds well for funded retirement savings. While...
by Tony Addison The last ten years or so have seen 56 major armed conflicts in 44 different locations, most of them civil wars. Different types of...
This volume explores the various linkages between financial development, institutions, growth and poverty reduction in low-income and transition countries. It is the result of a two-year research project undertaken by UNU-WIDER, and the strong range...
Poor people in developing countries are often affected by droughts, floods, illness, crop failure, job loss, and economic downturns. Much of their energy goes into coping with these shocks and into day-to-day survival. While insurance and credit...
Part of Journal Special Issue Impact of the Liberalization of the Exchange Rate and Financial Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Impact of the Liberalization of the Exchange Rate and Financial Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
Part of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Part of Book Domestic Resource Mobilization and Financial Development
Part of Book Domestic Resource Mobilization and Financial Development
Insolvency and debt recovery procedures are as crucial to a well-performing financial sector as credit provision itself. They are even more important in Africa, where attempts are underway to create fully-fledged financial markets. For the financial...
In most transitional and many developing countries institutions capable of supporting economic development with localized saving-investment cycles have not developed. This crucial gap is in no way addressed by either country-level macro programmes...
Since 1992 Ethiopia has been engaged in liberalizing its financial sector. The hallmark of the strategy is gradualism. The approach is not without problems especially from Bretton Woods Institutions that saw the reform as a sluggish process. This...
Since the 1990s economists have devoted considerable attention to the study of the relationship between financial markets development and economic growth. In particular, the emergence of stock markets with economic development is an intriguing and...
Using a vector error-correction model, I explore the short-run dynamics and long-run linkages between financial reform and the mobilization of domestic saving in Morocco. In the short run, financial depth (volume of intermediation) is shown to have a...
This paper considers the effect of financial liberalisation on access to investment finance using firm level data covering 57 developing and transition countries. An index is presented which measures financial market liberalisation along the...
The relationship between an economy's financial sector and the occurrence and resolution of conflict may at first sight appear tenuous. Banking systems, financial regulation and currency arrangements do not appear to be relevant in understanding why...
In C. Green, C. Kirkpatrick, and V. Murinde (eds), Finance and Development: Survey of Theory, Evidence and Policy.
Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain—which for decades had separated East from West—most countries of Central and Eastern Europe are now members of the European Union; some have even adopted the euro. Nonetheless, these countries have also...
Micro- and small-scale enterprises (MSEs) have become important players in the Kenyan economy, but at the same time they continue to face constraints that limit their development. Lack of access to financial services is one of the main constraints...
This paper examines the financial sector reform experience of Bangladesh. It finds that while there have been some improvements in competition and efficiency, loan defaults still remain a significant problem. It also finds urban bias in loan...
This paper discusses how the theory on the role of institutions in development can be improved, by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions. To understand the relationship between institutions and economic development, it...
Reconstructing the financial system in countries affected by violent conflict is crucial to successful and broad-based recovery. Particularly important tasks include: currency reform, rebuilding (or creating) central banks, revitalising the banking...
Using a unique district-level panel dataset, we investigate the effect of banking system penetration on financial inclusion in Ghana. To purge potential endogeneity bias in the underlying relationship, we exploit a change in the policy environment of...
The issue of institutional development has come to prominence during the last decade or so. During this period, even the IMF and the World Bank, which used to treat institutions as mere 'details', have come to emphasize the role of institutions in...
This paper discusses some of the principal issues relating to the reconstruction of the financial sector in conflict-affected countries, focusing on currency reform, the rebuilding (or creation) of central banks, the revitalization of the banking...
Ethiopia is one of a number of SSA economies that adopted state-led development strategies in the 1970s (others include Angola and Mozambique), and suffered from intense conflict (leading to the fall of the Derg regime in 1991). The new government...
We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results – based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust...
In this overview we try to explain, first, why funds continued to flow towards emerging economies while fundamentals in host countries had been deteriorating before the Asian crisis (rising external deficit, with a significant liquid component...
Using a comprehensive firm-level dataset spanning the period 1998-2005, this paper provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between firm size, total factor productivity growth and financial structure in China, controlling for the...
Modern financial regulation has been about the spread of market-sensitive risk-management systems for banks, the spill-over of this approach to other financial institutions and the retreat of regulatory ambition. There is evidence that these trends...
The paper explores the relationship between financial sector reforms and savings mobilization in Zambia. Although there exists an extensive literature on financial sector development and savings levels in developing countries, there does not seem to...
Information failures are a major barrier to formal financial saving in low income countries. Households in rural communities often lack the information necessary to set up formal deposit accounts or are uncertain about the returns to saving formally...
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Book Domestic Resource Mobilization and Financial Development
Part of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Part of Book The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries
Part of Book Domestic Resource Mobilization and Financial Development
Part of Book Globalization, Marginalization and Development
Part of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Part of Book From Capital Surges to Drought
Part of Book Advancing Development
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